Wife: “We should find a way to light up the little theater whitout setting curtains on fire, with something we can easily move, with some way to switch lights from behind the curtains…”

Axe: “Oh well, this weekend I’ll try to think something…”

…and here it is: 4 LED semi-spot for the stage, LED bars for the guests, single LEDs in the actor’s spaces in the backstage and a small remote control. All material can be stored in a metal case easily transportable. And almost of the materials is recycled: wood floor panels, Ikea led lamp holders, leftovers from my house wiring, and two lead acid batteries from an UPS.

Spot lamps and LED bars have magnetic hooks (dead hard disk magnets ;) ), so they can be attached to metal bars that makes the theater structure, and small leds for the backstage can be hung to the curtain fabric. I also provided for a car inverter connection, so we can power the audio player and speakers and be independent from an external power source.

The theater, with my lighting system, is dedicated to the performance “Burattinesque” by Manuela Tamietti.

Two notes: first of all, McGyver is an amateur ;) and… I hope that the acting company never needs to take a fly, because thist thing seems too much an explosive device to clean safely the airport security controls. :)

Unfortunately, I’ve kept no photographic documentation on the building steps, because I’ve built it on the fly using some wood that I already had in the basement. This is the final result. The joystick top is 32.6 by 17 inches, 1.2 inches thick, and almost bulletproof.
The hole in the center, between red buttons, is for the spinner.

This 12 channel light blinker has been connected to the lighting system of a train station scale model to simulate blinking light in different places and at different frequencies.

The “check panel” on the circuit, that shows with 12 mini-leds the output status, is very nice to see, but unfortunately I had not the chance to take a picture, but one day or another I’ll disassemble the full model to photograph the panel… :)

When I put for the first time my hands on a PlayStation, I liked very much the Sony controller. So I tried to find informations about the communication protocol between joypad and console. I found nothing.

So I borrowed an oscilloscope (my Zeroplus LAP-C arrived years later) and tried to reverse engineer the protocol.

This was a test program to help me in the reverse engineering, because the 2 channels of oscilloscope were not enough.

The program, with the aid of a simple hardware interface connected to then PC parallel port, can generate a data sequence on any output pins while reading and recording status of every controller signal

Here I am…

I'm Sergio Lorenzetti, or "Axeman" if You like.
Born in 1972, I work as programmer and sysadm , I play with electronics for fun, always passionated for anything technology related.
And this is my place on the Web.